No. 4.] . NICHOLSON — SEXUAL SELECTION IN MAN. 457 



or expansion of habits existing amongst the animals. Not only 

 is communal marriage an infinitely worse institution than any- 

 thing known to obtain amongst the mammals ; but it would not 

 be difficult to show that its very existence depends upon the fact 

 that man, alone of all the mammals, is not limited to a )»articular 

 period of the year in which he courts the female. But Darwin- 

 ism fails to assign any adequate cause to explain how man should 

 in the first instance have come to depart from the ordinary rule 

 amongst animals in this very important respect. On the other 

 hand, communal marriage is utterly opposed to all the feelings 

 which are known to reoulate the relations between the sexes 

 amongst the higher mammals. " With the existing Quadrumana, 

 so far as their habits are known, the males of some species are 

 monogamous, but live during only a part of the year with the 

 females, as seems to be the case with the Orang. Several kinds, 

 as some of the Indian and American monkeys, are strictly mono- 

 gamous, and associate all the year round with their wives. 

 Others are polygamous, as the Gorilla and several American 



species, and each family lives separate Again 



other species are polygamous, but several males, each with their 

 own females, live associated in a body, as with several species of 

 baboons." Upon the whole, therefore, Mr. Darwin concludes that 

 " communal marriage" never prevailed amongst the mammals in a 

 state of nature, or even amongst the primeval races of men, " if we 

 look far enough back in the stream of time." It would appear, 

 however, that such an admission strongly militates against the 

 whole Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of maU; If man be 

 descended from '' some ape-like creature," as Mr. Darwin asks 

 us to believe, it ought to be shown that the habits of man, at 

 any rate in his savage condition, are modifications of habits in 

 pre-human ancestors ; and as such ancestors are unknown to us, 

 traces of such habits, to say the least of it, ought to be shown to 

 exist in the monkeys, since these are assumed to be man's nearest 

 living relatives. But communal marriage, like so many of 

 man's vices and degraded habits, is strictly human, and no 

 traces of such an institution can be shown to exist in any of the 

 mammals. Nay more, such an institution is wholly foreign to 

 all the instincts of the brutes, so far as these are known to us. 

 We may readily suppose that each male quadruped (except 

 amongst the monogamous species) would prefer having as many 

 wives as he could get ; and hence we have no difficulty in 



